4.5.2014 More grey corriedale

I suspect that should I ever want blog fodder in the next five years I can drag out the grey Corriedale again.

No one would every be able to be quite sure whether I was showing you a work in process or just pulling your leg.

This is bobbin six of the singles, to be the last of the singles needed for the bobbin above; bobbin 2 of the chain plied finished product.  I do like spinning this stuff long draw.

4.2.2014 Rock Island done

The Rock Island shawl is finished: washed, blocked, worn, the whole nine yards.  Photographed finally.

Most of the lace was in the edging, then a bit more in the panel.  Not a difficult lace - the pattern is very repetitive and easy to follow.  Not so easy to pick up when you catch your needle on the side of the sofa and rip a jagged section off the needles - I tried picking up three times, then gave up, took whole thing back to the lower garter stitch section and reknit the entire lace panel a second time.  This may in theory have taken a little longer than picking up and fixing the issue properly, but since I find fixing a problem stressful and reknitting the panel soothing, the choice wasn't all that hard to make.

To get your very own wall o' snow:

Step 1: Have the weatherman predict snow, then hastily at the last minute upgrade it to 1 or 2 inches, no, 3 or 6 inches, what the heck, lets go for 8 or more!
Step 2: Have your neighbor move all his cars out of the driveway so he can have a furniture delivery made at 8 pm at night.  This will give him a good reason to forget that he's left his car in the street.
Step 3: Get 8 inches snow overnight and have the snowplow come down the street a couple of times before your neighbor gets dug out.  3 feet of snow piled up on all sides will give him lots to work with.
Step 4: Once you've help push your neighbor over that last barrier to freedom, wait for the snowplow to come back down the street to shove all that lovely pile of snow across the end of your drive.

Enjoy!

Antique words

I got a word-a-day calendar for Christmas - Forgotten Words.   It's been a lot of fun - mostly words that are oddities, sounding strange and referring to times and situations we no longer need, unless writing or reading an historical novel.  Haven't had a use for Quintain or Gabriel's Hounds recently.

On the other hand, every now and then there's a word I want to bring back into fashion.  We need these words, we just don't know it.  Yesterday's word:  Afterwrath.

Afterwrath is that anger you feel post facto - something that slipped past at the time, but the more you think about it the madder you get.  You weren't mad on the spot - you were focused on something else, you were busy, but afterwards when you think about what happened?  you know you should have been mad, you would have been mad had you given it your attention at the time.  Now, you're suffering from afterwrath.  Afterwrath is almost worse than wrath, because just like that feeling of coming up with the correct retort five hours later in the middle of the night when you were dumbstruck at the time, I find it harder to deal with the wrath that comes from "what-ifs" than I do with actually dealing with a situation on the spot.

I have a need for this word - I dunno why it fell out of use, wasn't widespread and became forgotten, was isolated to a small portion of the world originally and never moved on elsewhere.  No internet with its Urban Dictionary in the late 1800s?  How many other cool words are there that exactly describe things we don't give specific labels to any more?  Do you suppose the Internet may preserve these words for us in future?

3.8.2014 Merino laceweight, part the first

I spent quite a while spinning the purple merino laceweight.  I wound up with two unequal skeins - this is the first one wound into a ball.  315 yards - the other skein should be approximately twice that much.  At some point I'll figure out grist as well.  The whole started as 100 grams of fibery goodness from Freyalyn.

I had to go back and see when I last blogged about it  - ummm, that would be here.

3.5.2014 And some knitting too...

I've also been getting some knitting done - Rock Island by Jared Flood.  I was worried about running out of yarn, but so far it's looking fairly promising.  The problem with starting at the bottom and working to the shorter rows rather than the other way round is that by the time the edging and lace sections are done, there doesn't look like much yarn left.

3.1.2014 Spinning this week

Someone in my guild poked people to spin more this week.  So I did.  And actually took pictures.

Grey corriedale again.

And some of this pink silk top

turned out like this - short draft.  This can only be spun for a short period of time in a row because my hands get tired easily.  Nice to be able to switch back and forth between two wheels now!

2.24.2014 Grey fuzz => grey fuzzy yarn

2 pounds grey corriedale + wash + comb + pindraft

+ long draw =

1 pound 14 oz to go.

2.23.2014 Comfort food

I really like pumpkin pie.  Unfortunately I can't eat the standard crust any more and heartily dislike all substitutes for standard crust that I've tried to date.

Pumpkin custard in individual cups is at its best when eaten directly out of the oven before it's had a chance to congeal down - preferably when it is still so hot you almost but not quite burn your mouth.

It's pretty darn good later on too.

Take 2 pounds of Corriedale fleece.  Let age for a few years (not a mandatory step).

Flick either end of each lock open.  This is best done outdoors as the flicking process allows the fibers to separate and drop a lot of the captured dirt on the surface beneath you.  I prefer this to be grass rather than carpet, being just a tiny bit picky about that.

It leaves you with a bit of combing waste, which can be thrown away or composted.

Washing will be next.  I probably have one more combing session to go before it will all be flicked.  I will also probably divide it into two lots - some of the locks are shorter and with much more sun fading than the rest.

Tour de Fleece spinning, 2013

BFL and silk:

And something to go with it.  Eventually.

After the daylilies come the Oriental lilies...

There are ones that stare at the sky...

And ones that stare at the ground.

Daylilies, 2013

My favorite time of year in the garden:

9.25 Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week this week. Whatcha gonna read? I’ve slowly been working my way through the 100 most challenged books of 1990-1999 and then I suppose I’ll have to start on the ones of 2000-2009 that don’t overlap.

This week I’m going to try The Color Purple, which I’ve never gotten round to reading.

9.24 Just because

Test my vocabulary

This way I won't have to go take the test again to remember what it was.

Test your vocabulary?

8.17 Experimentation

The trouble with experimentation is that not all experiments are successes. The nature of the beast - it doesn't stop me from experimenting, and yet, I admit in this case to unreasonable disappointment.

Somehow, I expected this (Spice brown colorslide, Polwarth from Dunnose Head Farm):



plus this (Seal brown, silk noil):



to come out with a little bit more varigation that just plain baby-puke brown:


I keep trying to tell myself that it isn't really quite that bad, but I'm unconvinced.

I think I see an overdye pot in my future, but I'll probably spin it up first.

8.15 Wrapping up TdF

This summer is going by in leaps and bounds - I feel like I'm wearing 7 league boots as the world whizzes by. I've been away on vacation and am now back. Photos from that will have to wait until I post the photos from TdF which finished a week (two?) before I left.

I had plans for TdF, and some of them worked and some got sidetracked. I never got around to posting prep pics for the things that worked, and most of the stuff that I did show was sidelined for other things not originally on the radar.

So, this:


and this:


turned into this:


and then this:


and that is as far as that went.

This:


became this:


and this:


and eventually this:


Interrupted by this:


we eventually arrive at this:


And last but not least, I found a project that had gone awol:


and finished spinning it up, now resting on a bobbin, waiting for something to ply it to:


This never did get started during the TdF:

so progress pics on that will have to wait.

8.14 Daft or brilliant?

I’ve just done something either brilliant or really stupid. I’ve noticed when I do a search on a title in the library catalog that quite often there are multiple books by the same title and it occurred to me that it could be an interesting thing to see what different things could wind up with the same titles. Someone mentioned “Remember Me” a week or two ago in terms that made me write down the title on my “check it out” list, but I didn’t write down the author’s name. There are 12 different books titled Remember Me in the county library - I’ve ordered them all.

7.4 TdF part 2

The second thing I'm working on for the Tour de Fleece is also on a spindle. Ultrafine merino, dyed in Murex purple by Freyalyn. I have 100 grams and I'm shooting for cobweb. Dunno if I'll succeed at that, but I'm trying.



I'm making progress on it, but I doubt I'll finish in the next two weeks...

7.2 Tour de Fleece time

I'm working on several things for the TdF this year. One of them is starting out with the silk hankies from my box-o-fun.



I had given up hankies a few years ago because prepping them hurt my hands too much. ¹ I had been prepping them by poking a hole in the center and then slowly stretching them out into a large circle, before breaking the circle and spinning the result. This puts too much sideways pressure on the fingers and I gave it up and got rid of all my hankies.

Recently, however, someone mentioned spinning hankies by sticking the hook through the middle of the hankie and spinning without pre-stretching. This is working. I still am careful not to spin for too long at a time, but mixing the movements of stretching with spinning in short lengths is being much kinder to my hands that doing the stretching all at once.

I like the result of spinning hankies and caps - long smooth bits of silk mixed with the slubs and bumps. It looks like I'll be able to continue to spin it this way, at least for a while longer.

1 Developing osteoarthritis in the finger joints - it's been mentioned before that getting old is hellish, but now it applies to me. Grump.